The five-year liaison between Tony Blair and the "Tory press" was built on a calculation of mutual advantage. Tony Blair would promote the policies the Tory party was, after 18 years in power, too discredited to go on effectively promoting. The Tory press would give him their stamp of approval and refrain from rubbishing New Labour.
Like a penitent medieval monarch crawling on his knees before the Pope, Blair journeyed to Australia to crawl before the American citizen Rupert Murdoch, seeking his support in the 1997 British General Election. He got it.
But now the partnership of New Labour and the Tory press is over. The press barons have the knives out for Tony Blair and New Labour.
Blair's policies, give or take a blip here and there, still meet with their approval. The profound triviality of the issues chosen for discrediting Blair, such as whether or not he tried to give himself a bigger role at the Dowager Queen's funeral, chosen for use in discrediting Blair, is the measure of just how little real politics is involved here.
The ability of Alistair Campbell and his legion of spin-liars to manipulate and control the news on behalf of Blair always depended on the cooperation of the press. The press discovered that the government manages news, engages in systematic lying and employs professional political liars only when they decided to stop playing ball with Blair.
It's a good thing the Tory press is no longer at one with the Government. But even in their attacks on the Government, the press lords cut everything down to their own level, diminishing and trivialising politics.
They have great power. They have just demonstrated that by hounding the wretched Stephen Byers out of government because he - seemingly in a fit of absent-mindedness - acted against the interests of the Railtrack shareholders. (The Government has since agreed to pay them off).
Quite the most striking thing about the debate which the falling out of the Blairites with the Tory press has provoked in the Guardian, on Newsnight and other serious forums is that nobody - to our knowledge literally nobody - has questioned the fundamental thing: that the entire mass circulation press is the private property of rich men, who thereby dispose of an enormous weight in the political affairs of supposedly democratic Britain - corrupting, diminishing and poisoning both public discussion and the bourgeois democratic system.
Rupert Murdoch has just announced that the six major papers he owns will campaign in a future referendum against Britain joining the Euro. So will Conrad Black's press, and Lord Rothermere's.
It is taken for granted that this is a natural state of affairs, that such people should have such enormous power in a so-called democracy. At most, their is an occasional expression of regret that people like Murdoch, whose interests are not necessarily those of the British ruling class, have been allowed to buy British newspapers.
In fact the situation is grotesque, unnatural and intolerable. It should not be allowed to continue.
What's the alternative? Lenin outlined it back in 1919: "'Freedom of the press' is another of the principal slogans of 'pure democracy'. The workers know that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains... The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.
"Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any working man (or groups of working men, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing presses and public stocks of paper".
